The sound of marching feet blended into the sound of the river as the column of prisoners moved on. The two men stood in silence, the German captain and the Spaniard recently promoted to lieutenant, both large in their gray overcoats and like brothers in their silver caps with the black visors. The light of the sun had disappeared, and the cold was damper and more intense. Deep in the woods, beyond the road, night would be advancing, as it did in some of the narrow streets in the center of Madrid, where the sun still shone on the windows of the tallest buildings in the pure icy blue of November.
My friend asked the German who those men were. The German was both surprised and amused at the innocence of the young officer so new to the war, the unpolished Spaniard still not entirely worthy of being admitted into their superior German brotherhood despite the purity of his accent, his bravery at the front, and his devotion to Brahms. Juden! the German said, and his face took on a strange expression, as if he were sharing a lewd secret or piece of barracks humor. My friend imitates the tone and the look of sarcasm and scorn on the face of the German, who winked and nudged him with his elbow.
“I didn’t know anything then, but worst of all was my refusal to know, to see what was before my eyes. I had enlisted in the Blue Division because I believed everything they told us, I don’t want to hide anything or try to excuse myself, I thought that Germany was civilization and Russia barbarism, the steppes of Asia from which all the invading hordes of Europe had come for centuries. Ortega said Germany was the West, and we believed him. Germany was the music that touched me so deeply, the tongue of poetry and philosophy, law and science. You can’t know the passion with which I had studied German in Madrid, before our war, how vain I was when the Germans I interpreted for in Russia praised my accent. But that German word, Juden, was jarring, a discordant warning of something I had not heard until then, although surely I had heard it many times, I will not say what many said later: that they didn’t know, that they never saw or heard anything. We didn’t know because we weren’t of a mind to know. You can make an effort not to know, close your eyes and not want to open them, but once they’re open, what the eyes have seen cannot be erased.”
FIRST WAS THAT WORD, Juden. Then, maybe two hours later, he met a woman at the dance, a beautiful redhead with green eyes. He walked into a room filled with people, noise, and music and immediately picked her out, as if no one else were there, and in the first look they exchanged he knew she wasn’t German in the same way she knew that despite his uniform he was not like the other military men there. The city would have been dark, with no lights except at the street corners, a Baltic city in the winter of the war, occupied by the German army, under curfew, split by a river that would soon freeze and from which a fog rose that wets the paving stones and the streetcar tracks and seemed denser in the headlights of the military trucks.
My friend doesn’t describe the place where the dance was held, but I imagine it as I listen to him talk: one of those official buildings I’ve seen in Nordic countries, white columns and pale-yellow stucco, a cobbled square, its stones shining in the night damp, crisscrossed by streetcar tracks and cables, and at the rear a requisitioned mansion that is the only place where the windows are lit and from which music spills out to the square with the unexpected brilliance of ballroom chandeliers. Sudden light in a dark city, music in the terrified silence of the streets.
After the front, that place must have had the unreal splendor of a cinematographic mirage. But my friend goes on, ignoring that kind of detail as he ignores the bellow of laughter from the banking executives who are honoring someone at a nearby table, toasting in Spanish and English the success of some financial venture. He erases it all, the ballroom in 1943 and the restaurant of today, the sound of the orchestra and the sound of the cell phones, the gleam of leather on the German uniforms, the crunch of black boots on the gleaming parquet floor, the heel clicks of salutes. How intimidated he must have felt among so many strangers, nearly all of them of higher rank. The only thing that stands out in his story is the figure of the woman he was dancing with and whose name he can’t remember, unless he said it and I didn’t hear, and now I am tempted to invent a name: Gerda or Grete or Anicka: Anicka was the friend of Milena Jesenska in the death camp.
“I NOTICED HER THE MINUTE I walked into the room. There were officers from the army and the SS, and the blue uniforms of the Luftwaffe. Among all those military men I was the only one not German. Maybe that was why the woman stood looking at me when I walked by her, because she wasn’t German either. A tall redhead wearing silk stockings and a low-cut gown of some flimsy fabric, she wore a perfume I would like to smell once more before I die. You are still young, so you don’t know that some things are not erased by time. So much has happened since then,” my friend calculates mentally, with a smile trapped in a memory whose sweetness can’t be conveyed: fifty-six years ago, and it was November, as now, and he still holds intact the sensation of putting his arm around her waist, noting beneath the cloth the smoothness of a body made even more desirable by his being so long without a woman.
She was standing, very serious, beside a heavy man in civilian clothes — an ostentatious pinstripe suit — and there was a weary, conjugal air in the way they spoke without looking at each other. My friend doesn’t explain whether it was difficult to overcome his shyness, whether he danced with other women before approaching her, and since he isn’t writing a novel he doesn’t need intermediate episodes, doesn’t need to tell me what happened to the captain he came with. Right now, in his memory, he is alone with the redhead, as if silhouetted against a black background, and the woman doesn’t have a name, either because my friend has forgotten it or because I didn’t hear it and don’t want to give her one.